The best possible programming environment is comprised of emacs coupled with a "lispy" language such as Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket or Clojure and the REPL to go along with it.

Nerdvana.

And the somewhat sad thing is that this is only a shadow of what was once possible on Lisp Machines... In some areas, we really did make a big step back over the last three decades.

You're arguing that stating that water is wet is an assumption

If it's so obvious then it should be easy to back up your claim with data.

I highly doubt its even possible to obtain such data. The best you will have is anecdotal claims.

For example, do productive programmers tend to use Vim or is it the other way around? It's hard to find the causality.